It was never the breast we could do

IN NOVEMBER 1970, Australian troops were still in Vietnam, former French president Charles DeGaulle died and Test cricketer Justin Langer was born.

And controversially, the first Page 3 girl appeared in London’s Sun newspaper.

Rupert Murdoch, then based in Australia, was a young Aussie upstart who had just bought the tabloid.

The Sun’s photos of topless young women joined a vein of 1970s British popular culture that embraced crude jokes, mini-skirts and pirate shirts. That culture never really caught on in Australia, but The Sun would become the world’s highest-circulating newspaper.

This week, though, its Page 3 girl disappeared. Looming large was a petition with 217,000 signatures, calling for the pictures to be dropped. The No More Page 3 campaign group welcomed the change, calling it “a great day for people power”.

Though the Page 3 photos were always tasteless, after 44 years they were also no longer relevant.

“(The Page 3 girl) doesn’t titillate sufficiently to sell papers. She doesn’t irk anyone enough to run articles about her naughtiness. She fails, even, to be classy enough to motivate defence of her on free-speech grounds,” University of Melbourne lecturer Lauren Rosewarne wrote for the ABC.

The Sun execs refused to say if the Page 3 photos were gone forever. Perhaps that attitude should be consigned to the rubbish bin too.